Frozen voices: Women, silence and Antarctica Jesse Blackadder1 This chapter explores a different kind of Antarctic silence: the silencing of certain stories and voices. It’s the silence of the earliest female travellers to Antarctica. The voices of the earliest female travellers are silent and their stories remain untold, partly because there’s no place for them in the dominant Antarctic narrative of exploration and conquest. Reimagining them through fiction is one way — though with potential pitfalls — to ‘unfreeze’ those stories. The history of Antarctic exploration is about the adventures of men, particularly those in the so-called ‘Heroic Age’ from approximately 1897 to 1922. The great names of polar exploration, like Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Mawson, are well known and the mythology of their exploration, successes and failures still fascinates people today. The themes of their exploration narratives concerned heroism, conquest, suffering and male bonding. Arguably the most powerful exploration story was the race between the British Scott and the Norwegian Amundsen to the South Pole. Polar scholar Elena Glasberg says ‘This celebrated competition was motivated by all the familiar elements that shaped exploration history: the cultures of nationalism, imperial science, and male adventure’.2 Those defining moments of Antarctic history were masculine, and issues of gender were stamped on the landscape from the start. Antarctic historian Tom Griffiths describes it thus: ‘There was something spiritual about male comradeship, something pure about distant yearning and asexual love, and something incontrovertibly masculine about frontiering. The ice was their own inviolable space. In Antarctica, the presence of women could diminish a man. In their absence, one might prove oneself worthy of them’.3 This has led to a primary narrative of Antarctica, a tale of suffering, competition, and achieving the all-important ‘first’. No one just ends up in Antarctica — there is always a journey of some sort to get there. These ‘terrible journeys’, such as 1 Dr Jesse Blackadder, Writing & Society Research Centre, University of Western Sydney, 3 Muli Court, Myocum, NSW 2481, [email protected]. 2 E Glasberg (2002) ‘Refusing history at the End of the Earth: Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur” and the 2000–01 Women’s Antarctica Crossing’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21(1): 99–121, p. 101. 3 T Griffiths (2007)Slicing the silence. UNSW Press, Sydney, p. 214. 169 Antarctica: Music, sounds and cultural connections Cherry-Garrard’s ‘worst journey in the world’, Shackleton’s epic journey to save himself and his men, the competitive journey to the South Pole between Scott and Amundsen, and Mawson’s lone trek for survival, function as Antarctica’s formation myths. The linear journey of exploration, the classic ‘hero’s journey’, has become a blueprint for Antarctic stories. Where did women fit into this masculine space? According to polar scholar Elizabeth Leane, Antarctica itself was constructed as feminine in its literature.4 In some Antarctic narratives from the early 20th century ‘the continent resembles nothing so much as a monstrous feminine body that threatens to engulf the unwary male explorer’ (2009, p. 511).5 The heroic phase was characterised by expedition writing that characterised the continent as ‘an aloof virginal woman to be won through chivalrous deeds’.6 This is clearly expressed in the cartoon ‘Waiting to be Won’, from Punch in 1875, which depicts the ‘White Ladye of the Pole’. The verses printed with the cartoon said: But still the white Witch-Maiden that sits above the Pole In the snow-bound silver silence whose cold quells aught but soul Draws manly hearts with strange desire to lift her icy veil The bravest still have sought her, and will seek, whoever fail.7 Although this image relates to the North Pole, Leane points out that ‘both icescapes tend to be feminised when viewed as fields of endeavour’.8 Women’s entry into this space was obviously problematic. On a physical level women were actively — in fact, strenuously — excluded from Antarctica in the first century of its history. Access to Antarctica in that time was controlled by money, race and gender. None of the great heroic era explorers took women with them. Although opportunities for women were severely restricted, the desire for adventure wasn’t only a masculine one. Among Shackleton’s records is this letter from three young women who asked to join his expedition: We are three strong healthy girls, and also gay and bright, and willing to undergo any hardships, that you yourself undergo. If our feminine garb 4 E Leane (2009) ‘Placing women in the Antarctic literary landscape’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34(3): 509–14, p. 510. 5 Leane (2009) ‘Placing women in the Antarctic literary landscape’, p. 511. 6 Leane (2009) ‘Placing women in the Antarctic literary landscape’, p. 511. 7 Reproduced in F Spufford (1997) I may be some time: ice and the English imagination. Picador, New York, p. 178. 8 Leane (2009) ‘Placing women in the Antarctic literary landscape’, p. 510. 170 Frozen voices is inconvenient, we should just love to don masculine attire. We have been reading all books and articles that have been written on dangerous expeditions by brave men to the Polar regions, and we do not see why men should have the glory, and women none, especially when there are women just as brave and capable as there are men.9 Newspaper articles report that women applied to be included in Antarctic expeditions in 1919 at the tail end of the heroic era: THE ANTARCTIC. ANOTHER EXPEDITION. WOMEN WANT TO GO. LONDON October 18. Captain Cope is inviting applications from experts in the following sciences to accompany his expedition to the Antarctic regions:- Geology, meteorology, biology, photography, surgery, cartography, and hydrography. The party will number 51, of whom 17 will be engaged on shore work. A number of the members of the expeditions which accompanied Captain Sir R. F. Scott and Captain Sir Ernest Shackleton have joined the expedition. Several women were anxious to join, but their applications were refused.10 Antarctic exploration moved into the mechanical era in the 1920s, using planes and motorised ships to further exploration goals. But women were still actively excluded from participating. Twenty-five women applied to join Mawson’s British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) in 192911 and in 1937 the extraordinary number of 1,300 women applied to join the proposed British Antarctic Expedition.12 None were successful in being permitted to travel to Antarctica. Women were known to have sailed to the Far South as companions on whaling and sealing ships plying their trade around the wild subantarctic islands in the 19th century, though their names were often not recorded.13 In the mechanical era, it was possible for women to travel to Antarctica in greater safety and comfort as companions, providing support, care and domestic tasks. As in the history of American deep-sea whaling, generally the first women to go were the wives of the captains. 9 Reproduced in Spufford (1997) I may be some time, p. 144. 10 The Advertiser 10 October 1919, p. 7. ‘The Antarctic: another expedition: Women want to go’. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5633923. 11 The Argus (1929), p. 9. 12 The Argus 3 April 1937, p 17. ‘Women want to go to pole: 1,300 applications: “No,” says leader’. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11053800. 13 E Chipman (1986) Women on the ice: a history of women in the Far South. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, p. 11. 171 Antarctica: Music, sounds and cultural connections The first woman recorded to have set foot on Antarctica was Caroline (also spelt Karoline) Mikkelsen, who accompanied her husband south in 1935.14 He had been working as a captain in the Norwegian whaling fleet on ships owned by Lars Christensen, with instructions to look for Antarctic lands that could be annexed for Norway. During their voyage a group including Caroline went ashore for several hours, raised the Norwegian flag, built a cairn, had afternoon tea and then returned to the ship. Caroline neatly fitted in to the small role that could be allotted to women in the dominant Antarctic narrative: a domestic companion who was conveyed there by her husband and who set foot on the continent as an appendage to him. Although her landing wasn’t publicised at the time, her ‘first’ was later reclaimed and now appears in Antarctic lists and timelines everywhere, as well as in books and articles by feminist scholars. If you Google ‘first woman on Antarctica’, hers is the name that comes up. However, the reality’s not so simple. As Chipman says, ‘many of the “firsts” in the Far South are suspect and coloured by prevailing attitudes’ (1986 p. 6).15 Four women are known to have gone to Antarctica before Caroline, but they’ve been largely overlooked. I’d like to tell you something of their story. The Norwegian Ingrid Christensen first went to the Antarctic in 1931 (four years before Caroline) when she was 38 and had six children, whom she left at home. Her husband Lars was an entrepreneur who owned a large pelagic whaling fleet and personally funded much of Norway’s Antarctic exploration. Ingrid went as his companion on the refuelling vessel for his factory fleet, a relatively privileged position. Ingrid and her companion Mathilde Wegger were, in 1931, the first identifiable women known to have seen Antarctica.16 However, that year the expedition did not find a suitable landing site. Ingrid didn’t achieve that all-important ‘first footprint’. Mathilde faired even less well in recorded history.